Rainbow Whatsit @ 4 Days

As promised last night, here is a pic of my latest project. I'm calling it the Rainbow Whatsit for now as when I began it was ll about the rainbow and I had no set plan for the end product. Now I do but I'm keeping it to myself for awhile yet.

This is the most complex crochet item I've yet begun and I'm not following a pattern. I'm making it up as I go. And many of the stitches and techniques are brand new to my repertoire or yet to be learned.

So I will be posting pics and updates here whenever something significant has changed. The next one may not be until I've finished this 'panel' which may have to slow down as the pace of six to eight rows per day was proving too much for my poor wrist and arm.

Meanwhile I've started getting my craft related notes organized as a first step towards accounting for all the unfinished projects and prioritizing them.

One of the related tasks is to organize my floss and identify the colors and quantity I have and the equivalent color codes for DMC since most charts use DMC colors. This includes floss bought for projects begun, finished and not begun, floss from kits and floss given to me. Some of that floss is so old it's marked with prices ranging from 5 to 15 cents.

This is a a task that I've been planning to do for awhile now but it is motivated at this time by my desire to make a kit for a project from a free chart I found online that calls for 90 colors. I can't afford to just go and buy whole skeins of every color. Especially since many of them only call for a yard or two of a couple strands. This is a petit point cross stitch or needlepoint and needs to be done by Xmas.

It is 185 X 129 stitches so it is not a huge project but it is very intricate and the stitches are so tiny I'll have to wear the visor that magnifies to 2.5 and can not count on working for more than an hour or two per day. Once I identify which colors I have I can get started and Ed says we can pick up the rest of the colors at the rate of 5 to 10 every payday (twice a month) over the next three months or so.

The baby afghan is in the dryer as I type. It looked good coming out of the wash after going through on the extra delicate cycle. The plan is to put it in the mail tomorrow. That is the biggest project I've finished in a long time. I haven't crocheted an afghan since the home ec class I took in high school in the 70s.